A Norwegian green steel start-up has emerged as the preferred bidder for the former Liberty Steel operations in South Yorkshire, raising hopes of a long-awaited rescue of two plants that have become emblematic of Britain’s struggling heavy industry.
Blastr, a company backed by Oslo-based renewable energy investor Vanir Green Industries, has begun a five-week period of exclusive negotiations with the government’s official receiver to acquire Specialty Steel UK (SSUK), the company that owns Britain’s largest operating electric arc furnace in Rotherham and the downstream works in Stocksbridge.
If the deal goes through, it would put an end to one of the most protracted corporate collapses in recent British manufacturing history. SSUK has been in the hands of the official liquidator since August last year, when London’s High Court stripped embattled metals tycoon Sanjeev Gupta of ownership and declared the company “hopelessly insolvent”.
A successful sale would also give ministers a rare piece of good news on the steel file. The Department of Business and Trade is already wrestling with the future of British Steel at Scunthorpe, the Chinese blast furnace operation that was brought under state control about a year ago and is now widely favored for full nationalization. Whitehall officials had privately floated the idea of combining SSUK with British Steel to create a single, state-run specialist and long product champion, but sources suggest that option has been dropped as part of Blastr’s plans.
Confirmation of the exclusivity window came on Wednesday. “The official liquidator will seek to complete the sale at the earliest opportunity,” the government said in a brief statement. Officials pointed to the tight deadline of five weeks as a sign that negotiations were already well advanced.
For Blastr, the price is significant, but so is the challenge. The company does not yet own or operate a single functioning steel mill. Its flagship project is a greenfield site in Finland, where the company plans to use green hydrogen to produce low-carbon iron and steel – a technology that has not yet been commercially proven on a large scale. The company is led by Mark Bula, a steel industry veteran who has held senior positions with major producers in India and the United States and is seen as the driving force behind the push into the UK.
Industry observers believe Blastr will need significant external funding to get the Rotherham and Stocksbridge sites over the finish line. Still, insiders argue that SSUK itself is a fundamentally viable business, long hobbled by the chronic lack of working capital that plagued the broader Liberty Steel group under Mr Gupta and left the mills unable to regularly purchase raw materials. Gupta, whose global GFG alliance has shrunk sharply in recent years due to increasing money pressure, fought to the end to keep SSUK but was eventually overruled in court.
Rotherham’s electric arc furnace is a particularly strategic advantage. As the UK’s largest operational EAF, it is central to any credible vision of a lower carbon domestic steel sector, producing the type of specialist and structural steels used in the aerospace, defense and oil and gas industries – customers that the government is keen to continue to source domestically.
The reaction from the workshop was reserved. Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, a national secretary for the GMB union and a former steelworker herself, said that Liberty Steel staff were “at this point at the end of years of uncertainty – this must be a deal that secures the long-term future of steel production in South Yorkshire”. She added that “any sale of SSUK must include due diligence that ensures the ongoing operations and stability of the sites”, and clearly reminded that unions will closely examine Blastr’s financing package and operating plan before offering full support.
For a region that has seen its steelmaking tradition erode for decades, and for a government keen to prove its industrial strategy can do more than just keep businesses running, the next five weeks will be among the most consequential for the future of Britain’s specialty steel.
